Tuesday, September 11, 2007

When it happened it was immediately understood that somebody, somewhere was going to pay, and pay big. But who could have imagined the price: Orwellian endless war with multiple nations on the other side of the world, an ongoing state of government-generated low-level panic, powerful people driving the world into the abyss, cheered on by the media, while the rest of us hang on white-knuckled and stupidly horrified, gouging at each other with whatever weaponry we can get our hands on.

I remember at first there were a few weeks of worldwide, heartfelt solidarity. That went the way of all good things; the people in a position to manipulate us realized there was more money to be made from pants-pissing fear than courageous solidarity. With the spectre of planes slamming into skyscrapers as an ever-present backdrop, the politics of paranoia and division started in a big way. Divide and conquer. Then the lies, lies, lies, repeated until it was impossible to tell them from truth. What truth? Whose truth? The truth became a negotiable commodity, and remains so. Six years ago, who could have anticipated how royally we'd fuck this up?

It's raining today at Ground Zero, the flip side of the sunny summer morning six years ago when a low-flying plane approached New York City. And the fun stopped.